Ep. 9 – TCI: Connected to Teams

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Hi. Welcome to the connected interpreter podcast, where we will explore ways of staying connected to ourselves in our work, acknowledging the impact of our practices and continue to grow as practice professionals. I’m Amanda Smith, an interpreter, educator, coach and creative, and I’d love to discuss the puzzles of interpreting the complexities of human interaction and the power we have within ourselves to make a difference. So today’s episode is specifically about connecting with ourselves and both from a personal and a professional standpoint. And so as you go into listening to this, I want you to think about the following reflective prompts. So:

• what if anything is sparking your care for yourself, the work and others?
• Do you feel moved to take any action? And if so, what and when will you do it?
• What questions arise?
• What insights and connections do you see to yourself and your work? So those are the questions to keep in mind.
• I will answer a few of them at the end as well, and let’s go ahead and get started.

The Importance of Connecting with Interpreting Colleagues

So connecting with colleagues and teams is a lot of fun. It is also ripe for conflict, and there are compatibility is the word that came to my mind, or fit issues that can always arise as well, which means that this connecting with our colleagues, our team members, is something that needs to be intentional. It’s not just something that happens or is automatic or is something that we don’t need to think about at all. It is a joy to get to work with a team, particularly a team who you have synergy with, or who you have deep connection with in ways that meaning you kind of approach the work in a similar way, or you understand each other’s process. You know how to support one another, those kinds of things.

So connecting with your teammates is not, in my estimation, an afterthought. It is critical to the preparation that we do as interpreters. It is critical. It is as critical as connecting with the context, the consumers and the content. There’s certainly opportunities to connect with our team members ahead of time, if we’re aware of that, but we also need to stay connected to them throughout the assignment and post assignment as well.

Different Types of Interpreting Teams

Let’s talk a second about various kinds of teams that we might have. So there’s there are kinds of teams that you might put into a couple of buckets. So there are teams that you work with regularly. These might be people that you are assigned to a 16 week class in a college. So for those 16 weeks, you’re the regular team, and you’re in an ongoing team together. You may or may not be team to with one another from term to term, but that long term kind of regular teaming, you might work in an educational setting where you’re all staff interpreters in the same building, and you team together from time to time, but you also share the same workplace.

The other kind of two categories, I guess I’ll split it into two categories. One is people from your same community of practice, geographically speaking, but that you don’t team with all the time. You know them. You’ve worked with them. You might have one off jobs from time to time, and maybe work with them once a month or couple times a year. You don’t have regular interaction with them in the interpreting work, maybe out in the community, maybe in professional organizations, maybe in professional development, but in terms of working together on the job.

And then I think there’s this interesting third category that has developed since VRS and VRI, which is team members who are in the moment and completely unknown. Now, you certainly could be interpreting VRI and have a regular, ongoing team. You can have the intermittent team, but you also can have the brand new team who just shows up out of nowhere, and you’ve never worked with them before because they’re literally from a different part of I was going to say the planet, but probably the country, and you would connect with those people in different ways.

Grounding Yourself to Support the Team

And this is where you understand my bias at this point, that my bias is this connection to self, but I ultimately and. Fundamentally need to be connected to myself, first in a grounded way and also in a in that moment kind of way. So I need to know what it is that I have to offer today. What do I have to offer today in terms of how I’ve connected to myself, what my capacity is, what my capabilities are what my limitations are on this particular day, just as Amanda and then after I’ve maybe not after. This isn’t chronological, but connecting with consumers, context and content.

Communicating Your Needs to Your Team

What are the things that are going to be important for my colleague and I to talk about in preparation for and throughout the assignment, things like, Do you know any of the people, and should you have the lead on X, Y or Z? Is this content familiar to you? Are there tips you can give me? Are there you know? So, talking about the So, connecting to one another as individuals and then as a team, connecting with consumer context content, in order to as holistically as possible be present and providing access in the work itself. And those obviously take different forms. So if I’m working with somebody regularly, I can have a shorthand of how we’re doing today and what we’re talking about and how things are going to go similarly, I can have a little bit of a shorthand with somebody I work with intermittently, but I’m going to have to have a little bit more of a direct kind of overt conversation with them. And then the one off people is sometimes complicated by the fact of particularly in VRS. I haven’t worked in VRS in a really long time, but my understanding is you’re actually in the moment on a call and ask for a team. So you literally have no idea who this person is, but you need to be able to convey to them what you need and what you don’t need. So how do we take space? How do we how do we take time to actually make that happen so that we can be of best service.

One of the ways to connect with yourself in order to articulate your needs to a colleague or to a team member, is to really think about how you make meaning. What is it that you use? What are the resources you need in your meaning making process? Do you need validation/affirmation? Like a head nod. Do you need? Don’t talk to me unless I ask you for something. Do you need? Go ahead and tell me anything you think I’m missing or that I’ve dropped, and I will work it in as I can. What are the kinds of things that you need in the meaning making process that your team can be helpful with.

Logistical Challenges and Creative Solutions in Intense Settings

We often team and support other people in the ways that we need to be supported, and we actually kind of need to flip that. We need to know what we need, so that we can articulate that to our team and then ask questions to see what our team actually needs, so we can support them in the way that that that fosters the meaning making process in the best way possible for this interaction.

And sometimes teaming is really, you know, what I would consider tag team. So there’s not a whole lot of denseness. It’s just really long day. And so there are two of us so that we can have breaks, and other times there’s a team, because it’s really dense, and we need to both be in it 100% the entire time, even though it’s only an hour and a half so communicating about how you view the support role and what it is that you need. So for example. Might say I need a break when we switch. So every time we switch, I’m going to leave the room for five minutes of my break and just be in a separate space, get a drink of water, use the restroom, walk outside, whatever, and then I’ll come back and be with you and supporting you the rest of the way.

Or if it’s so intense that neither of us can leave, then we need to be able to signal each other when we need to let this the system know whatever’s happening there, that we actually need a break together. So I do a lot of court work, and there are times that we need a break as a team, meaning we have been all in for two hours, and we both need a team, a break. There’s there’s not a way for us to do it on the times that we’re not active because we’ve been active the entire time.

So then, how are we going to do that?

How are we going to signal to each other that we need that? How are we going to make the request to the system, the group that that is having the event?

How can we let them know that ahead of time, any of those kinds of logistical conversations, but you need to know what you need, and that is something that changes on a daily basis.

For me at least, and I think for most humans, we have different capacities and different abilities on different days, and we have to be able to connect to ourselves, which is not a magic wand, to then be a super interpreter. It means I now know where I stand. I now know what I have to offer, and I now know what I need on this day, connecting and grounding is not a cure for lack of preparation or lack of sleep or anything else that might might occur.

There are a number of resources, not as many as I would like, but really great ones available around teaming. Jack Hoza wrote a book in 2022 there are a number of articles on teaming and teaming best practices from Deb Russell, specifically research that she has done on teaming.

I would encourage you to take an inventory, kind of take the pulse of how you feel in teaming interactions. And do you feel like, Yeah, I think I got a good handle on this. Or do you feel like I feel like I can do some things, but then other things? There’s still this tension, and I’m not really sure how to address it. Pay attention to that. Pay attention to where there might be opportunities for you to become clear with yourself and then clear with your team. In order to hold space for the communication event that you are there to provide access to I will leave that there for today.

Conclusion

And again, I want to, I want you to think about anything that might have sparked your care if you feel moved to action questions that arise, what insights and connections you’re making. I’d love to hear from you about those insights ahas and questions. So feel free to reach out to me at arsmithstudios@gmail.com and you can also sign up for my very intermittent newsletter at arsmithstudios.com and click on the newsletter button in the upper right hand corner. So let me go back and answer some of these questions.

Amanda’s Musings on this Episode

So my thoughts on teaming, I think I will answer the question about what questions arise as I was talking about teaming and thinking through this connecting with teams, I have a lot of questions. I have a lot of questions about teaming practices that are based on 50 or more year old research studies of five people. I have questions about this idea that we’re always on and how does that relate to kind of the rest recovery needs that we might have during an assignment? Robyn Dean and Bob Pollard have done some studies, cortisol studies around stress and ongoing stress of interpreters that I think might have some implications to this in terms of what is the kind of rest, recoup loop that we need to have before we’re ready to be active again, if we’re actually working in this tandem team way. I also have questions about like, do we all mean the same thing? I know that I’ve had various experiences with teams over the years, and I was, you know, raised, quote, unquote, in one particular culture of interpreting and geographic location where teaming was fairly standardized, at least with the people that I. Teamed with where there was just kind of like, this is what we did in this geographic area, and everyone knew it. I don’t even know how we knew it, but everyone knew it. And so there wasn’t a need to really kind of talk about those kinds of things. And then I moved to another geographic region, and there were some people who were exactly the same, and then there were other people who were markedly different in ways that were astonishing to me, not not in a judgmental way, like what they were doing was bad, but in the way of like that had never occurred to me to do, to work as a team like that, because I had been raised in this other setting where everyone kind of did it the same way. And so I am really curious about kind of the generational and geographic narratives and maybe historical artifacts, which is a term that a professor said when I first joined Western I think it was my mentor actually said to me about because I would ask questions about, like, Well, why do we do This, and why do this, and why do we do that, and what is this about? And he would say, Oh, those are historical artifacts. Like, essentially, we’ve just done it that way, because we’ve always done it that way. So I wonder, I wonder about the historical artifacts around teaming for the interpreting profession, particularly the sign language interpreting profession. And I wonder what the actual needs are. And if we were to design teaming for today, what it would look like? Would it look the same? Would it look different? How I have questions about that, and then also in different settings and with different people, because I team differently with different people in different settings. And so is teaming a standard across all things, or is teaming very setting, specific, people, specific, geographic specific? Yeah, I have questions about that. So those are my thoughts. I’m super curious to hear yours.

So those are my answers to two of the questions, and I’m super curious to hear yours.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai